A beautiful reflection on the work of dying from Larry Zaroff in the New York Times.
Monthly Archives: August 2005
‘The Enemy of My Enemies’
Found this at the end of a reflection by Dan Clendenin for the fourth anniversary of 9/11: ‘The German Pastor Martin Niemoeller (1892–1984), who protested Hitler’s anti-semite measures in person to the fuehrer, was eventually arrested, then imprisoned at Sachsenhausen and Dachau (1937–1945). He once confessed, “It took me a long time to learn that …
Objects on the Stack: A Delphi Relic
Now here’s a dangerous and dubious technique for you to try at your own risk– allocate objects on the stack instead of on the heap. Hey, C++ does it all the time! The advantage: object allocation is at least twice as fast on the stack. Disadvantage: only applicable to objects which are local variables. Example …
Sunday Week 22 Year A
Though you might not guess it looking at me I’ve never been on a surfboard. I’ve never been a surfer—if you don’t count channel surfing and my mastery of the remote—but I have watched them once or twice and found it stunning— audacious and beautiful and dangerous. The heart of the surfer’s art is an …
Nature and Culture, Intelligence and Gender
As if to illustrate my previous post I discovered this via Slashdot: Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, argues that men have larger brains and higher IQs than women, to such an extent that they are better suited to “tasks of high complexity”. The professor has caused outrage in the past …
Continue reading “Nature and Culture, Intelligence and Gender”
Cosmology and Cricket (Oh and Evolution Too)
The game of cricket has been a consuming topic in the last few days–not least because one of our visiting retreat givers is a fanatic and another is from the US and rather bemused by it all. We end our midday meal with a brief prayer and today the person leading it began with a …
Continue reading “Cosmology and Cricket (Oh and Evolution Too)”
Angels, Ecology, & Virtual Reality
Some time ago I began to be interested in the interface between theology and spirituality and, in particular, the place they meet in cosmology. Theological cosmology, as i think of it, is not in the mainstream of theological study but I believe it deserves to be as it holds the clues to a fresh approach to some common theological impasses.
The paper which follows was written out of a striking experience of ‘spirit of place’. Everyone I’ve asked has their own experiences when a place and time become unexpectedly sacred for them. This is the phenomenon that provoked me to begin to explore what kind of ‘spirit’ makes sense of such experience. I rapidly found it is a conception of spirit that sends roots in two directions: into our theories of the world and into our theories of God. Hence theological cosmology.
Theology is often ridiculed by invoking the mythical question ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ but i believe there’s an unintended profundity here. It asks how spirit and place are related. That’s a question of intense ecological significance.
If you are interested read on…
Friday Week 20 Year I
Gormless, uncouth, inept and ruthless… we’ve lost their kinder, gentler opposites gormful, couth, ept, … and ruthful – full of ruth. What does ruth mean? You have to make a leap from ‘ruthless’ somewhere into the territory of care and concern. Ruth is that piercing sorrow you feel when you can’t dodge someone else’s distress. …
E=mc2
Nova has a great page of essays and articles to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s amazing year of discovery. The page of podcasts got me thinking. Here are ten top physicists given the brief to describe Einstein’s equation to curious non-physicists–and in under a minute or so! The results are fascinating. What I’ve been …
Turning Back The Clock
My ISP has invented a time machine … or at least this morning when I checked this page it was as if the last week had never happened. I’m awaiting the explanation but have in the meantime done my best to recreate the lost posts. Here they are (more or less) but what is missing …